Getting people to read good contemporary poetry is never easy, but in 1962 Penguin cracked it with their Modern Poets series. Each slimmish volume featured a representative selection from three poets; there were two series (1962-75, 1995-97), and No 10 – 1967’s The Mersey Sound, featuring Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten – sold 500,000 copies.
And now, after a two-decade gap, we have a new series. The first thing to note is that this initial volume wholly consists of work by women. Good. By my calculations, to reach gender parity, Penguin would have to put only one male poet in the next 27 volumes. (Obviously that’s not going to happen: the next book in the series, featuring Michael Robbins, Patricia Lockwood and Timothy Thornton, will be published at the end of October.)
This collection hits the ground running, both in terms of the work chosen and the way the first poem starts: “Actually, it’s Tuesday, and I’m taken aback.” This technique, starting in medias res, is of course as old as Homer, and it’s the opening line of Emily Berry’s “Dear Boy”, the title poem of her first collection, which won two awards (Forward First Collection, Hawthornden). We pick up the thread of the story in the next 11 lines: a voicemail saying, “I can explain everything!” And the rejoinder: “You know perfectly well I believe/ nothing worthwhile is explainable.”
There is deep, anxious wit in her work. The prose poem “Some Fears”, a list of dozens of phobias separated by semicolons, illustrates what poetry does best: make us look at the world anew, and not necessarily with ease. “Fear of catching anxiousness from dogs; fear of ragged-right margins; fear of exposure after pruning back ivy ...” (A nice touch, that, the fear of ragged-right margins, as that is how the work is laid out.)
An influence would appear to be Anne Carson, who has been publishing poetry since the 90s: she’s the next poet here, and if you don’t know her work, you’re in for a treat. A professor of ancient Greek (her biographical note in its entirety reads: “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living,” a pointed rebuke to the scant financial rewards of poetry writing), her poems are crammed with classical allusions that work even if you don’t know what she’s referring to. I did not know Ibykos, or his Fragment 286, but she has translated it straight and then rewritten it in various ways, including in the manner of John Donne, as an FBI report on Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Franz Kafka (“One is condemned to life not death”) and “stops and signs from the London Underground”. Carson has an intellect that is both high-powered and unstoppably playful: her jokes are more than just gags, but – and this is the great bit – they’re still funny. The interview with Stesichorus (no, me neither) is both a hoot and disturbing at the same time (“I was responsible for everyone’s sight ... Of course it had its disagreeable side I could not blink or the world went blind”).
Sophie Collins, the final poet in the book, is at the beginning of her career, with her first collection due next year. It is clear from this selection that she has her own voice; that there is enormous promise and that she is a worthy inclusion. Her poem “An Unusual Day” is not only extremely funny, it also gives us some clues as to the sternness of her gaze, which is taken up with noticing irritating human detail, specifically: sniffling, sneezing, coughing, sighing and breathing loudly.
Those who expect poetry to be laid out in a traditional manner and with rhymes may be disappointed. I, too, love such poetry when it is done well. But please do not be put off. This is poetry because, among other reasons, no one else could put the words down on the page in quite that way.
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